It is noteworthy that Senator Sander’s “inconsistent” rise to Super PAC pre-eminence is, in part, due to an unusual pairing of the Sanders campaign and Republican and ultra-conservative super PAC spending to attack Hillary Clinton. Of course the conservatives’ intent is simply to “elevate an avowed socialist.” One that Republicans, conservatives, and the Koch brothers believe will be easy to disparage in a general election. Don’t believe conservative PACs are helping Senator Sanders?
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In just one recent ad from the influential Republican super PAC [font color="red"]American Crossroads[/font], the uber-conservative group spent a substantial amount of its and the Kochs’ $4.3 million against Clinton parroting a constant Sanders’ attack against Clinton for earning Wall Street speaking fees. There have been no small number of pundits who have suggested, not errantly according to the American Crossroads ad campaign, that a fair share of the attacks on Clinton from “alleged” liberals [font color="red"]are being funded and promoted by uber-conservative groups[/font]. [/font]

If one looks at it from that perspective, Senator Sanders’ campaign is being funded and assisted by more than just one special interest super PAC, and at least one of them is run by Karl Rove.

There is nothing wrong with a campaign taking special interest money; at least not according to Citizens United ruling that Sanders abhors. However, there is an issue when a candidate fairly bases a key part of their campaign and appeal on “shunning” special interest and super PAC money; all while claiming it is funded by grass roots contributors and now Americans know by special interests and super PACs; even uber-conservative super PACs.

Republican operatives are having a strange crush on Bernie Sanders.

During Sunday night’s Democratic debate, the Republican National Committee made the unusual move of sending no fewer than four real-time e-mails to reporters defending the self-described democratic socialist from attacks by Hillary Clinton or echoing his message against her. Based on their content, one could be forgiven for thinking the RNC communiques came from the Sanders campaign.

One RNC e-mail, which was titled “Clinton’s Misleading Health Care Attack,” defended the Vermont senator from what it described as “the Clinton campaign’s inaccurate remarks on Sanders’ single-payer plan,” and quoted news articles that featured rebuttals of her arguments. A second message countered Clinton’s attacks on Sanders over gun control by pointing out her gun-friendly statements in the past. Two other e-mails sought to bolster Sanders’ case that Clinton is too close to Wall Street and the drug industry.

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Meanwhile, American Crossroads, a group co-founded by Karl Rove, is airing an ad in Iowa bolstering a core tenet of Sanders’s case against Clinton: that she has received large sums of campaign contributions from Wall Street, and therefore can't be trusted to crack down on big banks. “Hillary rewarded Wall Street with a $700 billion bailout, then Wall Street made her a multi-millionaire,” a narrator in the ad says. “Does Iowa really want Wall Street in the White House?”

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“In Iowa, American Crossroads is helping Bernie Sanders by depicting Hillary Clinton as a Wall Street insider,” Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, wrote on his blog.
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Liberal wonks often proudly say that their policy proposals are far more likely to be based on evidence than the proposals of conservatives. They scoff at the notion that big tax cuts can pay for themselves, or that loosening federal regulations on business could send economic growth through the roof. They have criticized the tax proposals of every Republican presidential candidate as budget-busting giveaways to the rich that rely on wild assumptions about the economy's growth prospects.

So it was notable that a group of left-leaning wonks -- including several former top economic advisers to Democratic presidents -- went hard at Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, attacking him for projecting that his proposals would deliver the type of enormous economic benefits that not even Republicans have dared to suggest their plans would accomplish.

Sanders' campaign has embraced projections that suggest, under his policies, middle class incomes would soar and economic growth would reach as high at 5.3 percent a year. That growth would, in turn, bring in more than enough tax revenues to fund his domestic spending priorities, including universal health care, free college, infrastructure and other projects. The calculations were done by a University of Massachusetts economist, Gerald Friedman.

"No credible economic research" supports those estimates, the former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers wrote in a letter to Sanders. "Making such promises runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic."

The signatories included Obama's former CEA chair -- Alan Krueger, Austan Goolsbee and Christina Romer -- and one of President Bill Clinton's, Laura D'Andrea Tyson.
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Mr. Tankersley;

"Brutal attack" ... "on Sanders" ... is this what you consider professional writing? Maybe the words were added to your title by your editor because the words you probably used weren't conveying the proper animus that HRC supporters (but are they HRC supporters? --- Who cares? If they are critical of Bernie they MUST be that witch's friends) are supposed to have towards Bernie.

More appropriate words might have been "scathing criticism" or "harsh criticism" ... and "of Sanders economic plan/predictions". Note it was NOT "brutal" nor an 'attack' nor was it an attack on the Senator the man. Aside from Right Wing "economists" this group of social scientists is very rarely accused of 'getting their blood up'. In fact, economics has been called "the dismal science" and some call it "the dead science" indicating the degree of excitement it's pursuit inspires.

If they had attacked Bernie the man ... severely, questioning his character or motives, then you might use the words "brutal" and "attack"... then you could accuse them of an "attack on Sanders". But these were famously dull economists expressing a technical criticism of an economic plan & prediction.

Yes, I would guess your editor inserted those words so as to hold to the proper characterization of anybody who defends Clinton, or in particular who criticizes Sen. Sanders policies, as bearing the Senator extreme ill will. Only obdurate hatred of the man could animate anybody to criticize Sir Good-at-Heart.

This is a text-book case of disinformation by suggestion and innuendo. How sad that the WaPo is reduced to grovelling before the GOP for approval. Helping to deliver Sen Sanders to the GOP is the plan, who will be exquisitely dispatched by GOP propagandists as a raving socialist intent on building a Kremlin on the Potomac and taking everybody's 'wealth' away (e.g. pick-up trucks along with the cinder block supports). I wonder if Trump will put a huge neon sign on the WH proclaiming the name of its new occupant.

Bernie Sanders supports abortion rights. He just doesn’t support them quite enough for reproductive rights groups.

The Vermont Senator was on the defensive at the CNN Town Hall Monday night when an audience member asked him about his assertion last week that Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign are part the “establishment” he plans to bring down. Both organizations recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, in the first primary endorsement in Planned Parenthood’s history.

Sanders reiterated his support for Planned Parenthood and called for increased funding before clarifying his comment. “What I said on a television program, and I did not say it well, is that sometimes the base of an organization looks at the world a little bit differently than the leadership,” he said. The implication was that the leadership of Planned Parenthood might be “establishment,” even if the base is not.

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“If you have 100 percent Planned Parenthood voting record, 100 percent pro-choice voting record, there are people who are asking, why is the leadership not either supporting Bernie Sanders or why are they, you know, opposing him?” Sanders asked Monday night. What more do they want from him?

Good question, and NARAL had an answer. “Senator Sanders once again highlighted the difference between an ally and a champion,” Kaylie Hanson, NARAL Pro-Choice America National Communications Director, said in a statement about the Town Hall. “His voting record is sufficient, but it doesn’t make him a champion for women. That champion is Hillary.” Cecile Richards has echoed that sentiment: “We have a lot of friends in Congress, but we have one true champion,” she said.

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House Republicans are threatening to withhold a large chunk of State Department funding until officials speed up their responses to document requests, including House demands for documents pertaining to the Benghazi investigation and a probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The House Appropriations Committee’s proposed 2016 spending bill for the State Department and foreign operations withholds 15 percent of the department’s “operational funds until requirements related to proper management of Freedom of Information Act and electronic communications are met,” according to a panel release.

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The State Department on Tuesday said the funding cut would only further cripple its efforts.

“A 15 percent reduction in the State Department operations budget would be counterproductive and only further constrain resources to meet the exponential increases in requests over recent years,” said spokesman Alec Gerlach, adding that State has achieved “a near 14 percent reduction in our appeals backlog last year.”

Since 2008, State has seen its FOIA caseload increase by more than 300 percent, jumping from fewer than 6,000 that year to about 20,000 last year.
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The House Appropriations Committee on Thursday struck down an amendment to a spending bill that would have undone a Republican provision to withhold some State Department funding over the terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

The measure, offered by Rep. Nita Lowey (N.Y.), the panel’s top Democrat, would have eliminated a directive in the committee’s state and foreign operations bill for fiscal 2016 to reserve “15 percent of State Department’s operational funds" until the agency provides more documents related to the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans.
Speaking in favor of her amendment, Lowey said the provision is “merely latest effort in [a] Republican crusade to profit politically from the tragedy of Benghazi.”

Instead, the GOP should cut the “unlimited funding” to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, “which has existed for over a year and produced zero substantive information,” said Lowey, who also serves as the ranking member on the state and foreign operations subcommittee.

She said that instead of sparking reforms to diplomatic security, the investigation has become a “scapegoating political exercise to influential the 2016 presidential election,” alluding to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, who was the top U.S. diplomat at the time of the assault.

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Lowey’s amendment was defeated 30-20 in a roll-call vote.
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In the wake of Antonin Scalia's sudden death, the Beltway press almost immediately began to seamlessly frame the unfolding debate about the Supreme Court Justice's replacement along the contours of Republican talking points. To do so, the press continued its habit of looking away from the GOP's stunning record of institutional obstructionism since 2009.

Immediately after the news broke of Scalia's passing, Republican Senate leaders, GOP presidential candidates, and conservative commentators declared that the job of picking Scalia's replacement should be performed not by President Obama, but by his successor.

Quickly suggesting that Obama was picking a "fight" with Republicans by signaling he plans to fulfill his constitutional duty by nominating Scalia's successor, the press aided Republicans by presenting this radical plan to obstruct the president as being an unsurprising move that Democrats would likely copy if put in the same position during an election year. (Given the rarity of the situation precedents aren't perfect, but it's worth mentioning that during the election year of 1988, Democrats actually did the opposite, confirming Justice Anthony Kennedy unanimously.)

The framework for much of the coverage regarding the GOP's radical demand that Scalia's seat sit empty for a year is this: It's Obama's behavior that's setting off a showdown, and of course Republicans would categorically oppose anyone Obama nominates. But journalists often don't explain why: Why is it obvious Obama would have zero chance of getting a Supreme Court nominee confirmed when every president in the past has been able to fill vacancies?

It is unusual for a president to face a Supreme Court vacancy his final year in office? It is. But there's nothing in the Constitution to suggest the rules change under the current circumstances. (Obama still has 50 weeks left in office.) It's Republicans who have declared that all new rules must apply. And it's the press that has rather meekly accepted the extreme premise.
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Georgia congressman John Lewis was on the receiving end of Twitter’s wrath after he appeared to dismiss Bernie Sanders’ work during the civil rights era.

Lewis, a civil rights icon who walked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama was endorsing Hillary Clinton for president when he was asked about Sanders’ participation in the civil rights movement.

“I never saw him. I never met him,” Lewis said. “I chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years from 1963 to 1966. I was involved in the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed the voter education project for six years. I met Hillary Clinton, I met President Clinton.”

That apparently didn’t sit will with Sanders supporters. Lewis quickly became a top trending topic on Thursday, with some trolling Lewis on Twitter:
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Citizens United has been going after Clintons since 1992 and now they’re going to feel the heat.

Hillary Clinton has a plan to go after the nefarious dark money that’s trying to buy elections and it goes beyond a Constitutional amendment. It’s fair to say that of anyone talking about Citizens United, no one has been on the receiving end of their nefarious lies like 2016 Democratic Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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Citizens United started by a conservative group that was lobbying against Hillary Clinton, so Clinton starts off saying it’s personal. Knowing that, her statement takes on a new edge.

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political system, and drowning out the voices of too many everyday Americans. Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee,” Clinton said in a campaign statement. “It starts with overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and continues with structural reform to our campaign finance system so there’s real sunshine and increased participation.”

Details of Clinton’s plan were released by her campaign Tuesday and include:

[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #000000;"] Overturning Citizens United by appointing Supreme Court Justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections, and by pushing for a Constitutional amendment to allow common sense rules to protect against undue influence from special interests and restore the role of average voters in elections.

· Ending Secret, Unaccountable Money in Politics by pushing for legislation to require public disclosure of significant political spending, and, until Congress acts, promoting SEC rulemaking requiring publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending to their shareholders and signing an Executive Order requiring federal government contractors to fully disclose all political spending.

· Amplifying the Voices of Everyday Americans by establishing a small donor matching system for presidential and congressional candidates that will incentivize small donors to participate in elections and candidates to spend more time engaging a broad, representative cross-section of constituents.